Professional Development
Professional 6: Professional standards in everyday practice
Use Good medical practice as a practical framework for competence, respect, teamwork, honesty, raising concerns and sustainable professional behaviour.
Clinical safety: Use current guidance, local policy and patient-specific judgement.
Learning objectives
Describe the four-domain structure of current Good medical practice. Apply professional standards to everyday clinical and organisational decisions. Recognise duties around competence, teamwork, respect, honesty and raising concerns. Explain why seniority does not remove the need for reflection and development. Use professional standards as a decision framework rather than a retrospective checklist.
Core reading: standards are operational, not decorative
Good medical practice is most useful when applied before and during decisions, not only when something has gone wrong. It provides a professional framework for maintaining knowledge and skills, communicating and partnering with patients, working with colleagues and systems, and maintaining trust. For an experienced SAS doctor, professional standards apply equally to autonomous clinical work, supervision, leadership, service redesign and management. Seniority increases influence but does not create unlimited authority. Work should remain within competence, with appropriate support and escalation where systems or resources make safe practice difficult. Respectful workplaces are also a professional issue. Behaviour that undermines colleagues, excludes them from relevant information or normalises unfairness can affect patient safety and team performance. Professionalism includes how doctors respond to concerns, feedback and mistakes.
Integrity, openness and sustainable practice
Professional trust depends on honesty in records, communication, declarations and evidence. If something has gone wrong, openness includes responding appropriately, contributing to learning and meeting applicable duties of candour or organisational requirements. Sustainable practice matters too. Doctors should recognise factors that may impair safe performance, seek appropriate help and use organisational systems where workload or resources create risk. Professional standards should not be interpreted as requiring silent acceptance of unsafe conditions.
